Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  Jamie laughed. “You mean it, don’t you? You’re telling the truth, you’re ready to go.”

  “Sure. Why shouldn’t I tell the truth?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jamie, laughing at him.

  Before he left the hotel, he picked up an old crime-club selection in the library, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a light pulpy book gnawed by silverflsh and smelling of the summer of 1927. Kitty saw him and wanted to go to the camper with him. He saw that she was exhilarated by the storm, and since she was, he was not. No more for him the old upside-down Manhattan monkey business of rejoicing in airplane crashes and staggering around museums half out of his head and falling upon girls in hurricanes. Henceforth, he resolved, he would do right, feel good when good was called for, bad when bad. He aimed to take Kitty to a proper dance, pay her court, not mess around.

  Accordingly he proposed that they stay in the bird room and play mahjong with Poppy and Jamie and Rita but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  Once they were outside in the storm, however, he felt better despite himself, though he had sworn not to feel good in bad environments. It was going to be a bad storm. Under the dirty low-flying clouds the air was as yellow as electric light. His spirits rose, he told himself, because it might be possible for them to enter here and now into a new life. If they were trapped by the storm in the Trav-L-Aire, they could sit at the dinette and play gin rummy, snug as children, very like many another young couple who came down here in the days of the great Bobby Jones and had a grand time. Sit face to face and deal the cards and watch the storm, like a chapter from Mary Roberts Rinehart entitled “Trapped in the Storm: Interesting Developments”; perhaps even steal a kiss or two.

  The camper was hove to in a hollow of the dunes. He had snugged her down with a hundred feet of nylon rope which he wound around cabin and axle and lashed to iron rings set in some broken beachworks. Inside the cabin he pumped up the butane tank and lit the little ashen mantles. Soon the camper leapt against its tether; the wind sang like a harp in her rigging. She creaked in every joint like the good prairie schooner she was and wouldn’t leak a drop. The sand scoured the aluminum skin like birdshot.

  He got Kitty across the table fairly enough but she was not onto the game he wanted to play. Instead of dealing the ancient honorable Bicycle cards he’d brought from the hotel and playing gin rummy in good faith for itself (That was it! Ordinary things such as gin rummy had lost weight, been evacuated. Why?) and worrying about the storm in good faith and so by virtue of the good faith earning the first small dividends of courtship, a guarding of glances, a hand upon the deck and a hand upon the hand—most happy little eight of clubs to be nestled so in the sweet hollow of her hand, etc.—instead she gazed boldly at him and used up their common assets, spent everything like a drunken sailor. She gazed like she kissed: she came on at him like a diesel locomotive.

  “Oh me,” he sighed, already in a light sweat, and discarded the jack of clubs.

  “Aren’t you picking up jacks?” he reminded her.

  “Am I?” she said ironically but not knowing the uses of irony.

  Look at her, he thought peevishly. She had worn leotards so many years she didn’t know how to wear a dress. As she sat, she straddled a bit. Once in a Charleston restaurant he had wanted to jump up and pull her dress down over her knees.

  Abruptly she put her cards down and knocked up the little Pullman table between them. “Bill.”

  “Yes.”

  “Come here.”

  “All right.”

  “Am I nice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I pretty?”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, how would I look to you if you saw me in a crowd of girls?”

  “Fine. The best, in fact.”

  “Why don’t I think so?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She stretched out her leg, clasping her dress above the knee; “Is that pretty?”

  “Yes,” he said, blushing. It was as if somehow it was his leg she was being prodigal with.

  “Not crippled?”

  “No.”

  “Not muscle-bound?”

  “No.”

  “I worry about myself.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “What do you really think of me? Tell me the literal truth.”

  “I love you.”

  “Besides that.”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Oh darling, I didn’t mean that. I mean, do you also like me? As a person.”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think other boys will like me?”

  “I don’t know,” said the engineer, sweating in earnest. Great Scott, he thought in dismay. Suppose she does have a date with another “boy.”

  “I mean like at a dance. If you saw me at a dance, would you like to dance with me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you know that I’ve danced all my life and yet I’ve never been to a regular dance?”

  “You haven’t missed much,” said the engineer, thinking of the many times he had stood around picking his nose at Princeton dances.

  “Do you realize that I’ve hardly ever danced with a boy?”

  “Is that right?”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Dancing with a boy?”

  “Show me, stupid.”

  He switched on the Hallicrafter and between storm reports they danced to disc-jockey music from Atlanta. There was room for three steps in the camper. Even though they were sheltered by the dunes, now and then a deflected gust sent them stumbling.

  She was not very good. Her broad shoulders were shy and quick under his hand, but she didn’t know how close to hold herself and so managed to hold herself too close or too far. Her knees were both workaday and timid. He thought of the long hours she had spent in dusty gymlike studios standing easy, sister to the splintery wood. She was like a boy turned into a girl.

  “Will I do all right?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Going to dances.”

  “Sure.” It was this that threw him off, her having to aim to be what she was.

  “Tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “How to do right.”

  “Do right?” How to tell the sweet Georgia air to be itself?

  “Do you love me?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  The storm crashed around them. Kitty drew him down to the lower bunk, which was like the long couch in an old-style Pullman drawing room. “Hold me tight,” she whispered.

  He held her tight.

  “What is it?” she asked presently.

  “I was thinking of something my father told me.”

  “What?”

  “When my father reached his sixteenth birthday, my grandfather said to him: now, Ed, I’m not going to have you worrying about certain things—and he took him to a whorehouse in Memphis. He asked the madame to call all the girls in and line them up. O.K., Ed, he told my father. Take your pick.”

  “Did her

  “I guess so.”

  “Did your father do the same for you?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t know until this minute that it was hore. I thought it was whore.”

  “No.”

  “My poor darling,” said Kitty, coming so close that her two eyes fused into one. “I think I understand what you mean. You’ve been brought up to think it is an ugly thing whereas it should be the most beautiful thing in the world.”

  “Ah.”

  “Rita says that anything two people do together is beautiful if the people themselves are beautiful and reverent and unself-conscious in what they do. Like the ancient Greeks who lived in the childhood of the race.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Rita believes in reverence for life.”

  “She does?”

  “She says—”

  “What does Sutter say?”

  “Oh, Sutter. Nothing I can repeat. Sutter is an im
mature person. In a way it is not his fault, but nevertheless he did something dreadful to her. He managed to kill something in her, maybe even her capacity to love.”

  “Doesn’t she love you?”

  “She is terrified if I get close to her. Last night I was cutting my fingernails and I gave her my right hand to cut because I can’t cut with my left. She gave me the most terrible look and went out. Can you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well. I’ll be your whore.”

  “Hore.”

  “Hore.”

  “I know,” said the engineer gloomily.

  “Then you think I’m a whore?”

  “No.” That was the trouble. She wasn’t. There was a lumpish playfulness, a sort of literary gap in her whorishness.

  “Very well. I’ll be a lady.”

  “All right.”

  “No, truthfully. Love me like a lady.”

  “Very well.”

  He lay with her, more or less miserably, kissed her lips and eyes and uttered sweet love-murmurings into her ear, telling her what a lovely girl she was. But what am I, he wondered: neither Christian nor pagan nor proper lusty gentleman, for I’ve never really got the straight of this lady-and-whore business. And that is all I want and it does not seem too much to ask: for once and all to get the straight of it.

  “I love you, Kitty,” he told her. “I dream of loving you in the morning. When we have our house and you are in the kitchen in the morning, in a bright brand-new kitchen with the morning sun streaming in the window, I will come and love you then. I dream of loving you in the morning.”

  “Why, that’s the sweetest thing I ever heard in my life,” she said, dropping a full octave to her old unbuttoned Tallulah-Alabama voice. “Tell me some more.”

  He laughed dolefully and would have but at that moment, in the storm’s lull, a knock rattled the louvers of the rear door.

  It was Rita, looking portentous and solemn and self-coinciding. She had a serious piece of news. “I’m afraid something has come up,” she said.

  They sat at the dinette, caressing the Formica with their fingertips and gazing at the queer yellow light outside. The wind had died and the round leaves of the sea grapes hung still. Fiddler crabs ventured forth, fingered the yellow decompressed air, and scooted back to their burrows. The engineer made some coffee. Rita waited, her eyes dry and unblinking, until he came back and she had her first swallow. He watched as the muscles of her throat sent the liquid streaming along.

  “I’m afraid we’re in for it, kids,” she told them.

  “Why is that?” the engineer asked since Kitty sat silent and sullen.

  “Jamie has telephoned Sutter,” Rita told Kitty.

  Kitty shrugged.

  The engineer screwed up an eye. “He told me he was going to call his sister Val.”

  “He couldn’t reach Val,” said Rita flatly.

  “Excuse me,” said the engineer, “but what is so alarming about Jamie calling his brother?”

  “You don’t know his brother,” said Rita trying to exchange an ironic glance with Kitty. “Anyhow it was what was said and agreed upon that was alarming.”

  “How do you know what was said?” asked Kitty, so disagreeably that the engineer frowned.

  “Oh, Jamie makes no bones about it,” Rita cried. “He’s going to move in with Sutter.”

  “You mean downtown?” Kitty asked quickly.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the engineer.

  “Let me explain, Bill,” said Rita. “Sutter, my ex, and Kitty and Jamie’s brother, lives in a dark little hole next to the hospital. The plan of course had been for you and Jamie to take the garage apartment out in the valley.”

  The engineer shrugged. “I can’t see that it’s anybody’s loss but mine if Jamie would rather live with his brother. In fact, it sounds quite reasonable.”

  Again Rita tried to enlist Kitty in some kind of exchange but the girl was hulkish and dull and sat gazing at the sea grapes.

  “It’s like this, Lance Corporal,” said Rita heavily. “Kitty here can tell you how it was. I saved the man once. I loved him and pulled him out of the gutter and put him back together. And I still think he’s the greatest diagnostician since Libman. Do you know what I saw him do? Kitty was there. I saw him meet a man in Santa Fe, at a party, speak with him five minutes—a physicist—ask him two questions, then turn to me and say: that man will be dead of malignant hypertension inside a year.”

  “Was he?” asked the engineer curiously. “Dead, I mean?”

  “Yes, but that’s neither here nor there.”

  “How did Sutter, Dr. Vaught, know that?”

  “I have no idea, but that’s not what concerns us now.”

  “What were the two questions?”

  “Ask him yourself. What is important now is what’s in store for Jamie.”

  “Yes.”

  “Here again Kitty will bear me out. If not, I shall be glad to be corrected. It is not that Sutter is an alcoholic. It’s not that he is a pornographer. These traits, charming as they are, do not in themselves menace Jamie, or you or me—no matter what some people may say. I flatter myself that all of us are sufficiently mature. No, what concerns me is Sutter’s deep ambivalence toward Jamie himself.”

  “What do you mean?” asked the engineer, straining his good ear. The storm had begun banging away again.

  “He has every right to make away with himself but he can damn well leave Jamie alone.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Kitty. “I mean, I don’t believe he tried to harm Jamie.”

  “It is not a question of belief,” said Rita. “It is a question of facts. Do you deny the facts?”

  Kitty was silent.

  “It was an experiment,” she said presently.

  “Some experiment. What do you think of this as an experiment, Lance Corporal. Last summer, shortly after Sutter learned of Jamie’s illness, he took him camping in the desert. They were lost for four days. Even so, it was not serious because they had plenty of water. On the fourth day the canteens were found mysteriously emptied.”

  “How did they get out?”

  “By pure freakish chance. Some damn fool shooting coyotes from an airplane spotted them.”

  “He meant no harm to Jamie,” said Kitty dully.

  “What did he mean?” said Rita ironically.

  “Val said it was a religious experience.”

  “Thank you all the same, but if that is religion I’ll stick to my ordinary sinful ways.”

  “What do you mean, he is a pornographer?” the engineer asked her.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” said Rita calmly. “He likes fun and games, picture books, and more than one girl at a time.”

  “I don’t think it’s pornography,” said Kitty.

  “This time, by God, I know whereof I speak. I was married to him. Don’t tell me.”

  “My brother,” said Kitty solemnly to the engineer, “can only love a stranger.”

  “Eh?”

  “It is a little more than that,” said Rita dryly. “But have it any way you please. Meanwhile let us do what we can for Jamie.”

  “You’re right, Ree,” said Kitty, looking at her for the first time.

  “What do you want me to do?” the engineer asked Rita.

  “Just this. When we get home, you grab Jamie, throw him in this thing and run for your life. He’ll go with you!”

  “I see,” said the engineer, now falling away like Kitty and turning mindless and vacant-eyed. “Actually we have a place to go,” he added. “He wants either to go to school or visit his sister Val. He asked me to go with him.”

  Rita looked at him. “Are you going?”

  “If he wants me to.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Presently he came to himself and realized that the women had left in the storm. It was dark. The buffeting was worse. He made a plate of grits and bacon. After supper he climbed into th
e balcony bunk, turned up the hissing butane lamp, and read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd from cover to cover.

  Chapter Four

  1.

  THE SOUTH HE CAME HOME TO was different from the South he had left. It was happy, victorious, Christian, rich, patriotic and Republican.

  The happiness and serenity of the South disconcerted him. He had felt good in the North because everyone else felt so bad. True, there was a happiness in the North. That is to say, nearly everyone would have denied that he was unhappy. And certainly the North was victorious. It had never lost a war. But Northerners had turned morose in their victory. They were solitary and shut-off to themselves and he, the engineer, had got used to living among them. Their cities, rich and busy as they were, nevertheless looked bombed out. And his own happiness had come from being onto the unhappiness beneath their happiness. It was possible for him to be at home in the North because the North was homeless. There are many things worse than being homeless in a homeless place—in fact, this is one condition of being at home, if you are yourself homeless. For example, it is much worse to be homeless and then to go home where everyone is at home and then still be homeless. The South was at home. Therefore his homelessness was much worse in the South because he had expected to find himself at home there.

  The happiness of the South was very formidable. It was an almost invincible happiness. It defied you to call it anything else. Everyone was in fact happy. The women were beautiful and charming. The men were healthy and successful and funny; they knew how to tell stories. They had everything the North had and more. They had a history, they had a place redolent with memories, they had good conversation, they believed in God and defended the Constitution, and they were getting rich in the bargain. They had the best of victory and defeat. Their happiness was aggressive and irresistible. He was determined to be as happy as anyone, even though his happiness before had come from Northern unhappiness. If folks down here are happy and at home, he told himself, then I shall be happy and at home too.

  As he pressed ever farther south in the Trav-L-Aire, he passed more and more cars which had Confederate plates on the front bumper and plastic Christs on the dashboard. Radio programs became more patriotic and religious. More than once Dizzy Dean interrupted his sportscast to urge the listener to go to the church or synagogue of his choice. “You’ll find it a rich and rewarding experience,” said Diz. Several times a day he heard a patriotic program called “Lifelines” which praised God, attacked the United States government, and advertised beans and corn.